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Knowing a Thai lady, I've got some idea of how it differs from English. Bit of an eye-opener. But I don't conclude that tense and gender are superfluous; far fr

Knowing a Thai lady, I've got some idea of how it differs from English. Bit of an eye-opener. But I don't conclude that tense and gender are superfluous; far from it. In fact the tenses in English are extensive and extremely useful. If they're unnecessary then a whole lot of other things might be considered so as well. Perhaps we should just say there are differences in languages, and not judge those.

eru 3y ago
To a first approximation, all human languages need to express similar things. If you want to eg talk about the past or future, you can put the markers for the different times into your verbs (like English or German do with grammatical tenses) or you can put those markers into other parts of the sentence (like English or German also do). Eg in colloquial English you can say 'tomorrow I go to the market' and be well understood. Even if in print you would put it as 'tomorrow, I will go to the market'.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  'tomorrow I go to the market' and 'tomorrow, I will go to the market' mean slightly different things in English. the first one is something like "I have it in my calendar" or "that's the plan" or "as is routine" the second one is a declaration of current intention, in some cases emphasizing your determination.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Or as my Thai lady would say "tomorrow I go to shop". As I got a better understanding of why she spoke that way, because there weren't those structures in her native language, it made me do a lot of hard thinking about English and left me with a lot of unanswered questions, but tenses are useful. "l will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" – that's compact and informative and I'd like to know how a Thai speaker would render that. Incidentally redundancy serves a useful purpose of error detection and rectification, just as much in human speech as in RAM.
  - wdutch 3y ago
    I am familiar with a few south east asian languages and none would have any issue expressing "I will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" ... I think even in English if a second language speaker said "I go to barber while I in town", it's still possible to understand. Regarding redundancy, I so think that it's important and other languages have other ways of handling it. I know that Vietnamese for example very often doubles up the verbs for example for "help" it's common to say giúp đỡ together although both these words individually also mean help.
  - tanvach 3y ago
    Hmm I think translating that faithfully will need a bit more context. But usually you can just say ตอนที่อยู่ในเมืองจะไปตัดผมด้วย translating to ‘whilst in town (will) go cut hair also’. The ‘จะ / will’ is a universal word that can be added to other verbs to signify ‘future in due course’.
tanvach 3y ago
In my thinking, tenses is a bit like compression where you can condense temporal relationships into a single word. In Thai, we are more explicit and add more words. Though Thai words tends to be shorter (since we have tones to disambiguate sounds), adding words are not that expensive. I’m not a linguist, so this is just a hypothesis. Also, don’t take it the wrong way - the usage of superfluous is strictly logical. Like saying computer languages are superfluous (who ever needs anything other than an infinitely long tape?).

eru 3y ago

To a first approximation, all human languages need to express similar things. If you want to eg talk about the past or future, you can put the markers for the different times into your verbs (like English or German do with grammatical tenses) or you can put those markers into other parts of the sentence (like English or German also do). Eg in colloquial English you can say 'tomorrow I go to the market' and be well understood. Even if in print you would put it as 'tomorrow, I will go to the market'.

fsckboy 3y ago
'tomorrow I go to the market' and 'tomorrow, I will go to the market' mean slightly different things in English. the first one is something like "I have it in my calendar" or "that's the plan" or "as is routine" the second one is a declaration of current intention, in some cases emphasizing your determination.
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
Or as my Thai lady would say "tomorrow I go to shop". As I got a better understanding of why she spoke that way, because there weren't those structures in her native language, it made me do a lot of hard thinking about English and left me with a lot of unanswered questions, but tenses are useful. "l will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" – that's compact and informative and I'd like to know how a Thai speaker would render that. Incidentally redundancy serves a useful purpose of error detection and rectification, just as much in human speech as in RAM.
- wdutch 3y ago
  I am familiar with a few south east asian languages and none would have any issue expressing "I will be going to the barbers while I'm in town" ... I think even in English if a second language speaker said "I go to barber while I in town", it's still possible to understand. Regarding redundancy, I so think that it's important and other languages have other ways of handling it. I know that Vietnamese for example very often doubles up the verbs for example for "help" it's common to say giúp đỡ together although both these words individually also mean help.
- tanvach 3y ago
  Hmm I think translating that faithfully will need a bit more context. But usually you can just say ตอนที่อยู่ในเมืองจะไปตัดผมด้วย translating to ‘whilst in town (will) go cut hair also’. The ‘จะ / will’ is a universal word that can be added to other verbs to signify ‘future in due course’.

tanvach 3y ago

In my thinking, tenses is a bit like compression where you can condense temporal relationships into a single word. In Thai, we are more explicit and add more words. Though Thai words tends to be shorter (since we have tones to disambiguate sounds), adding words are not that expensive. I’m not a linguist, so this is just a hypothesis. Also, don’t take it the wrong way - the usage of superfluous is strictly logical. Like saying computer languages are superfluous (who ever needs anything other than an infinitely long tape?).